Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
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Friday, May 27, 2011

Right wing wiretapper James O'Keefe has just gotten IRS approval for a "nonprofit" organization he set up.

This is the same reactionary hatchetman who was caught redhanded trying to wiretap the phones in the offices of a U.S. Senator, Mary Landrieu.

I predicted at the time he would get off easy, because reactionary criminals virtually ALWAYS get away scot-free or nearly so for crimes that progressives get long prison sentences, in harsh conditions, for. (For that matter, progressives are framed up for crimes they didn't commit, and get sent away.)

Once again we see it makes no difference which corporate party controls the executive branch. In fact, Obama has been savage in attacking the fools who are the Democrats' allies.

Obama helped O'Keefe and the GOP and corporate media destroy ACORN. ACORN's crime? Registering poor people to voter. The GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) figured they'd vote Democratic. You'd think the Democrats would thus defend ACORN. No way. Because the Democrats hate the idea of the population becoming politically mobilized as much as the Republicans do. All the Dems want is for the people to be like sheep and just dutifully go to the polls every 2 years and pulls the Democratic levers. (Or vote on the GOP's crooked electronic machines, which steal elections.)

And the corporate media covered up the kid glove treatment of the wiretapper O'Keefe. In fact, he's a media darling. Even the "liberal" NY Times covered up the wristslap, mentioning it only once, deeply buried in a long article. Their report on the IRS favor for this thuggish creep criminal never even mentioned his wiretapping or Obama letting him get away with it.

Contrast the kid glove treatment of the Democrat's enemy, O'Keefe, with how Obama is treating Tim DeChristopher. He "disrupted" a U.S. land auction in Utah for oil and gas drillers by bidding at the auction. He was charged with the felonies of making a false statement to the federal government and with violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act, which establishes a competitive bidding process for oil and gas leases. The Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior refused to accept his offers of payment for his bids. At trial in the kangaroo court, the Judge, as is the usual practice in political railroad cases, refused to allow him to defend himself. Specifically, he was barred from preventing evidence of his raising money to pay for the bids. His "defense" was banned from talking about anything other than what happened on that day. And is de rigueur in U.S. political railroads, he could not discuss his motives. Only the prosecutors could do that, to show his "criminal intent." Duly convicted, Obama is looking to lock him up for 10 years. (Vs. not a single day in jail for the rightwing wiretapper of a Senator O'Keefe.) "Ironically," Obama's corrupt Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, a party hack, subsequently decided not to auction the lands for drilling after all! (The auction process had started under the Bush regime.)

The vindictive U.S. government always puts its political prisoners in especially harsh confinement. "Ecoterrorists," for example, (that's the Government's term for environmental activists they convict of vandalism, arson, etc.) are locked up with Muslim "terrorists" either in the inhuman "supermax" prisons, which are like coffins, or in "Communication Management Units." That's a euphemism for cutting off the prisoners from the outside world, with almost no visitation, phone, correspondence "privileges." The idea is to make them unpersons, get the outside world to forget them, prevent political organizing around them.

On the other hand, Bernard Madoff, sentenced to 150 years for a massive Ponzi scheme, isn't even in a regular maximum security prison! He's in one of those camp-like detention centers. Not locked in a cell during the day. Free to give lengthy visitors to all manner of journalist, visiting and by phone. No "communication management" for him.

Today the Spanish Government (a "Socialist" government, they want people to believe), had its police beat sitting protesters in a Madrid square to forcibly break up an "illegal" demonstration against the economic policies that bleed the people to pay off the top strata of international finance capitalists.

Just as in Bahrain, or Yemen, or Jordan, or Israel, or Egypt, or Russia, or Syria, or China, any protest against thesystem is not allowed.

This is not new, nor unique to Spain. In Italy a few years back, people trying to protest a G-7 meeting were savagely beaten by Italian police, teeth kicked out while victims forced to lay on the floor, then made to sing fascist anthems back in their captors' lairs ("police stations").

The U.S. is notorious for smashing demonstrations against G-7 and G-8 meetings, and at the conventions of the two corporate parties ("Democrats," who represent plutocrats, so are hardly democratic, and the Republicans, also called the GOP, or Gang Of Plunderers). Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, and other places all saw police attack peaceful protesters and raid their gathering places in advance, arresting them illegally and destroying/stealing their signs, puppets, and other protest paraphernalia. In NYC at the last GOP convention in that city, thousands were rounded up off the streets, including people just passing by, and imprisoned illegally.

But OH, what a STINK the Western media is raising over China arresting the artist Ai Wei Wei.

Perhaps the propagandists of the corporate media should look in a mirror once in a while.

Friday, May 20, 2011

In country after country, the Catholic Church, that self-appointed arbiter of morality and repository of holiness, has been exposed as a nest of pedophiles. Pedophile priests are systematically aided and abetted by the bishops and cardinals who are their bosses. They are protected under a cloak of secrecy, and the victims were silenced until recently.

Now the Church, and its capo, the "Pope," an allegedly infallible being with the authority of some "God" behind him, has fingered the culprits in an official report. Turns out it was the hippies. I'm not kidding. They say the "sexual revolution" made them do it. See? The sexual revolution turned priests into pedophiles, and made their bosses protect, aid, and abet them. They were merely copying all those influential hippie pedophiles you heard so much about.

Oddly, they don't explain how they could be so weak in adhering to their own alleged values. Did they all smoke pot too? Drop acid? Drop out of their organization? Maybe they burned draft cards. (Of course it would have had to be other people's, since among their many privileges, they were and are exempt from the draft.)

This sick insulting bullshit should be the last straw from this gang of moral hustlers. For a couple of thousand years, these con men have been running a pathological mind control operation based on guilt and fear- fear of death, fear of the wrath of an imaginary superpowerful being, and fear of the awful physical tortures meted out by this "church" to anyone who dared cross it. Even today, their stranglehold on countries like Ireland, El Salvador, and even "leftist" Nicaragua, is so powerful that abortion is illegal, and contraception too in some cases. Yet in private these hypocrits commit sexual crimes.

This scam has helped them amass billions in wealth, and great political power, which they use in league with the worst reactionary scum on the planet- fascists like Franco, Mussolini, Salazar, even Hitler, and Latin American death squad regimes. Now they have the nerve to try and blame the counterculture for their misdeeds!

This cult should be indicted under the RICO act as a racketering organization.

If you've ever studied the history of the Third Reich, you know that the Nazis increased their repression of Jews and other "enemies" by degrees. Jews were banned from various professions, banned from using public transport, banned from more and more activities, and so on. Later came the roundups and eventual extermination.

Immediately after 9/11/01, the FBI used its new powers to put Greens and other activists on the no-fly list, banning them from air travel. Now New York Senator Charles Schumer has a brilliant idea- he wants to put the hundreds of thousands of people on the no-fly list on a no-train list, meaning they can't travel by train. I guess next will be a no-bus list, and finally a no-driving list. (Ironically, this guarddog of Wall Street interests refuses to oppose an actual menace, the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which endangers at least 20 million people who live within a 50 mile radius of it. His pet duckling, the junior U.S. senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand, does likewise, since she copies all his positions.)

The FBI has for decades kept lists of thousands of people they hate on detention lists, to be rounded up and put in concentration camps during "national emergencies." In the past few months they have been raiding the homes of peace activists, seizing their computers and other property, and dragooning them before grand juries to force them to give information on their organizations, contacts, and activities. I.e. the U.S. is a police state that monitors and represses dissent.

This is not new. In fact, it has been this way since John Adams was President. Under Adams, Alien and Sedition Act, publishers and critics of Adams were imprisoned.

Meanwhile the Supreme Court has just "legalized" police breaking down people's doors without warrants if they THINK "evidence" is being "destroyed" inside. The case arose out of a marijuana case. Marijuana, of course, shouldn't even be illegal. Under the excuse of a "war on drugs," for 40 years now civil and human rights have been systematically stripped from people in this country. Since 2001 the "war on terror" has provided an excuse to ramp up this repressiveness. (In the name of "defending freedom," of course. Paging George Orwell...we've got a case of Newspeak here, where words mean their opposite, straight out of 1984.

World War One gave us Wilson's "Espionage" Act, used to imprison pacifists and anyone who spoke against U.S. involvement in that war. Today it is being used by the Obama regime to persecute NSA whistleblowers for daring to expose abuses by that super-secret-police spy nest to their own superiors and to Congress.

The tiny minority who think for themselves, or even "worse," dare to protest and resist, are isolated from the pacified sheep majority, so there is no way to reverse this fascist tide from continuing to rise. The only hope is eventually their economy will collapse and something new can arise out of the rubble.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Do you really think they'd pull the head of the International Monetary Fund off a plane, drag him into a police interrogation room, and then lock him up on Rikers Island, the New York City jail complex, denying him bail, if there was any doubt about his guilt?

And some poor African immigrant, a widowed single mother supporting a teenage daughter, immediately reports the attack, is going to lie? Her lie would have fallen apart after 10 minutes of police questioning. She's had to tell her story over and over and over again to detectives, prosecutors, and now the grand jury under penalty of perjury if she lies. The case is being handled by a special detective unit that deals with sex crimes- 6,000 cases a year. They're specially trained and highly experienced. No way someone could create the massive tissue of lies that would be required to fool them, and have it jibe with the physical evidence, other witnesses, and totality of the circumstances- especially an unsophisticated immigrant cleaning woman!

Of course, sexist assholes ALWAYS say the woman is lying. Apparently there's no such thing as rape. And that the victims are golddiggers after money. (Preposterous assertion in a criminal case such as this.)

At least Dominique Strauss-Kahn is at least having to do a week locked up. Although he not only has his own cell, he has an entire jail wing to himself, and a tv to boot, according to the New York Times today.

His scumbag attorneys, Benjamin Brafman (who specializes in defending particularly loathsome clients) and William Taylor (imported from D.C.) are already making absurd statements- that if there was sex, it was consensual. And Brafman, before the evidence has even been all gathered, and before the prosecution has shared it with him, already KNOWS that "the forensic evidence will show" his client is innocent. Gee, he already knows what the evidence will show! Amazing seer!

There are honorable ways to defend despicable clients, and their are despicable ways. Brafman and his ilk specialize the latter, which includes sliming and slandering the crime victims.

Here's another reason to never make deals with the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers); they doublecross you and don't keep up their end of bargains. (A primary reason is that appeasing fascists never works. They interpret it as weakness and just make new, even more outrageous demands. We see it in their relentless drive to roll back the U.S. to the 1920s, pre-New Deal, pre-unions, and their evisceration of abortion rights, among other things.)

Obama caved in on continuing the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, in return for the Republicans agreeing to an extension of unemployment insurance for the millions of workers considered useless by the capitalists running the country. Expert hostage-takers, the economic terrorists of the GOP are ruthless. (They play the same extortion game with shutting down the government to impose vicious cuts in social spending- never military or secret police spending- and now are threatening to crash the financial markets, and with them, the economy, as just happened a couple of years ago, by refusing to raise the debt ceiling if the Dems don't agree to gut Medicare and Social Security.)

Well now they're reneging on the deal Obama cut in secret behind the backs of the Congressional Dems (who should defy this "leader" who backstabs them) while he strung them along and had them engage in what turned out to be sham "negotiations" with the neofascist GOP. They're moving to slash unemployment aid to the states.

"The Republican plan takes $31 billion from unemployed workers and throws it to the states, allowing them to cut taxes on businesses, re-pay their loans to the federal government, or fill in other state budget cuts." said Representative Sander Levin (D-MI). According to Levin, "Essentially what the Republicans are doing is reneging on what they voted for," namely the commitment by both parties to extend benefits through 2011, last December. "Every Republican on the Ways & Means Committee voted to extend this program through the end of this year and now essentially they are reneging." For some reason Levin is baffled by this insensitivity to workers. Of course insensitivity isn't the problem. Callous, ruthless, ideological fanaticism in the support of greed is.

Of course, as usual the Gang Of Plunderers has a slimy line to spin things- they say throwing more money at business in the form of tax cuts will enable them to create jobs. Of course, that is nonsense. Businesses don't create jobs just to create jobs. They hire the minimum number of workers they need. Big U.S. corporations currently have about 2 trillion dollars in cash. Obviously they have plenty of money to "hire workers." Their goal, as the GOP well knows, is first, last, foremost, and ALWAYS, ONLY to maximize profits.

"Well what's wrong with that?!" defensive ideologues sometimes retort at this point. If nothing is wrong with it, why don't you ADMIT it instead of always obfuscating it? Why do you make up bullshit cover stories? And why do corporations- especially oil and chemical corps- run ridiculous ads claiming their dedication to humanity is what drives them?

Right or wrong, the nature of capitalism is that profits aren't everything, they're the ONLY thing. So don't pretend otherwise.

Monday, May 16, 2011

The “managing director” (boss) of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, appears to be a rapist. He tried to rape the cleaning woman at his $3,000 a night suite in a New York City hotel, forced her to blow him, then immediately fled, hopping an Air France jet destined for Paris. But the police held the plane and pulled him off.

Oh sure, we have to “assume” he’s innocent. Actually just the jurors, if he ever goes to trial, have to assume that. The rest of us can make assumptions based on information available to us. The guy takes it on the lam, leaving his cellphone and other items behind. The car service driver who took him to Kennedy Airport says he was nervous, stressed, and in a big rush. And do you really think the cops are gonna drag an important poohbah like him off a plane unless the charges are solid? Today he was denied bail!

By the way, he’s done this before, in France, but it was hushed up. The victim that time was Tristane Banon, a journalist and novelist, in 2002. Le Parisien reported the attempted rape, and the victim described it on TV cable channel Paris Premiere in 2007.

Plus he’s a serial adulterer, including during his stint at the IMF.

The irony here is that the IMF is a rapist of entire countries. It rapes them on behalf of the top strata of finance capital, headquartered in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. It was set up, with the World Bank, at the end of World War II, to enforce big capital’s domination of the world.

P.S. We all assume Osama bin Laden and others like him are guilty. So the “presumption of innocence” is a nicety reserved for the privileged.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Kind of ironic that reactionaries are demanding that George Bush get the credit for Obama's assassinating Osama bin Laden. The Wall St. Journal and every other of the seemingly endless neofascist media outlets that blanket the U.S. consciousness has been harping on that ridiculous theme. Their justifications boil down to two: 1) he "started the process," whatever that vagary is supposed to mean, and 2) "enhanced interrogations" (what normal humans call torture) produced intel that led to bin Laden.

Of course, if Obama were a Republican, and Bush had been a Democrat, these neofascists wouldn't be demanding credit for Bush, they'd be sneering at what a failure Bush was compared to the manly Obama.

Of course, "enhanced interrogation" is torture. Aside from the fact that it obviously is, by the descriptions of the "techniques," the whole point is to FORCE prisoners to TALK by physical pressure and pain. If it wasn't torture, they wouldn't be doing it.

And it's a lie to say they got critical intel that way. In fact, Sheikh, Khalid Mohammad, the "mastermind" of 9/11, was waterboarded (drowned) 183 times, and he refused to give up the courier that supposedly led to bin Laden. So if anything, we now have proof that torture DOESN'T work (it certainly didn't work in this case). Fact is, as the former chief army interrogator in Iraq says, FALSE intel derived from torture sent them on time-and-resource-wasting wild goose chases. If anything, torture RETARDED the hunt for bin Laden.

Now, on to Bush's treason. The CIA's former head of the Get bin Laden squad, Michael Scheuer, said on at least one radio interview that I heard personally that he was at Tora Bora when bin Laden was cornered there. Scheuer radioed to have 450 army Rangers sent to get bin Laden- and this was REFUSED.

Now this is just 2 months after 9/11. You might remember the frenzy the U.S. was in at that time about bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. They were going to turn the world upside down and shake it until bin Laden fell out.

Instead they decided to outsource getting this #1 monster to the ragtag "Northern Alliance," a grabbag of Afghan opportunists, mercenaries and warlords!

So why on earth would they deliberately allow bin Laden to escape? Simple. They needed to bogeyman to still be out there. They were still in the process of passing more repressive laws, grabbing more and more secrety police powers for the FBI, NSA, CIA. And critically, they needed bin Laden as an excuse to invade Iraq. Recall, on the very day of 9/11/01, Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's War Secretary, ordered that the attack be connected to Iraq. Even before they came into power on Bush's coattails, the so-called "neoconservatives" (mostly Jewish hard-right reactionaries) had been pushing for years to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, presumably to serve Israel. There is plenty of public papers and articles by this gang to that effect. (Even more sinisterly, they wanted "another Pearl Harbor" to galvanize public opinion to invade Iraq. And they got one. Plus, the evidence is overwhelming that the FBI and CIA had the 9/11 plotters in the U.S. under surveillance, and deliberately allowed the plot to go forward. That's another essay, but I'll just mention two key facts- the refusal of FBI D.C. headquarters to allow the FBI office in Minnesota to search the computer of captured 9/11 would-be pilot Zacarias Moussaouri, who was arrested prior to the fateful day, and who French intel had told the U.S. was a terrorist; and the fact that the landlord for 2 of the hijackers was an FBI informer. When Congress wanted to qauestion the informer and his FBI handler, the FBI flat out refused, and Congress backed down. Which by the way proves the U.S. is a police state. How else can a secret police force outrank the national legislature, except in a police state? [See, NY Times, Oct. 6, 2002,

Monday, May 09, 2011

Barack Hussein Obama is maximizing the political advantage of killing Official Enemies of America. A week after ordering the assassination of Osama bin Laden by a SEAL death squad, he appeared on CBS TV's 60 Minutes show, taking up the entire hour (minus commercials) to expound on how he ordered the killing. "Me me me," was the content.

The same day, he tried to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who exhorts people to wage jihad against the U.S. and "Western interests" as they're called. Basically, a man with dangerous opinions. A drone, Obama's favorite weapon, attacked a couple of cars in Yemen, where al-Awlaki and his group, "Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula"- it's a franchise- is. It missed the first time, and the second time killed a couple of confederates of al-Awlaki, but missed him. Oh well. Obama has another 18 months before the election to try and add al-Awlaki's scalp to his belt. (By the way, a U.S. court threw out a suit by al-Awlaki's father to challenge his son's presence on the U.S. death list. The court ruled that the father didn't have "standing," i.e. the matter didn't affect him directly! Also, it was a "political" issue, not a legal one. The Federal judge who threw out the suit did opine that it seemed strange that a warrant was needed to wiretap a citizen, but not to kill one. Gee, life is strange, huh, your honor?)

And anyone who thinks there's something wrong with assassination, is sick in the head. So says Obama, in the last words in his 60 Minutes interview:

" Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined."

Anyone who would even question what Obama did is crazy. Talk about a totalitarian impulse.

Saturday, May 07, 2011

It has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda. It has to do with legitimizing government assassinations of enemies.

Most of the time, the enemies governments assassinate are not violent. Numerous examples abound, including in the U.S. (Martin Luther King Jr., Terry Santana, the arson murder of John Trudell's family on the same day he led an AIM protest outside FBI HQ in Washington, murders of Puerto Rican Independistas, etc.). The Russians went to Britain to murder Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium. Pinochet, the U.S.-installed and backed butcher of Chile, sent death squads to other Latin American nations, Europe, and the U.S. to murder "enemies" (called "traitors" in twisted fascist-speak). More examples would fill books.

Just as it did with torture, the U.S., by openly sending death squads to murder opponents, which it calls "justice," morally degrades the whole world by lowering the level of civilization. As the lies of the Obama regime are peeled away day by day, it becomes clear this was an assassination. Now they admit that bin Laden was unarmed, and shot through the head, and Paki photos reveal he was apparently shot in bed.

The New York Times and other U.S. media sources keep spreading the lie that there was a 40 minute "firefight," while at the same time if you read the fine print it turns out that ONLY ONE person in the compound fired back, and he was killed at the outset. The rest of the 40 minutes was spent killing 4 defenseless people, including bin Laden and one of his sons, and scooping up computers and data storage devices. They also dropped the "woman used as a human shield" story, a hoary favorite whenever they kill civilians- the Israelis too use that as justification for the mass slaughter of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in their periodic punishment attacks.

Just as the "human shield" story was recognizably bogus on its face, so was the "40 minute firefight." There was no mention of large numbers of Al-Qaeda fighters to be the other side of this mythical "firefight." How would even 5 guys with guns hold off a force of 24 (or 79- they keep switching between two numbers) highly trained elite killers for 40 minutes? Just not possible.

Another line is that "bin Laden was the most dangerous man in the world," hence needed to be shot on sight- like he's Bruce Lee or something. Ridiculous, deliberate confounding of two senses of the word "dangerous." He certainly wasn't dangerous in a personal physical sense, like say, Mike Tyson. But I guess we're supposed to visualize bin Laden like a comic book villain, with superhuman power. Just as we're supposed to imagine a 40 minute "firefight" by SEALs against a faceless hoard of Islamic fanatics, a la the Hollywood movie propaganda that is burned into our brains. (And guns never run out of bullets in those fantasies either!)

We also got doubletalk about him not surrendering, Reuters already revealed on the very first day (Monday) that it was a "kill not capture" mission. But the U.S. media just ignored that, allowing liars like chief White House mouthpiece Jay Carney to say the SEALs' orders were to capture him if he surrendered." But CIA boss Leon Panetta, who directed the mission and provided live narration for the edification of the top U.S. Imperialists watching the show, said he didn't think bin Laden had time to say anything. (Obviously not, since he was shot on sight, as per orders.)

This has nothing to do with whether bin Laden "deserved to die." This has to do with murderous governments summarily executing enemies. If they decide YOU'RE an enemy, they could do the same to you. And in fact, they've made many "mistakes" in the "War on Terror." Many times the "wrong" people are killed in night raids in Afghanistan. Drone missiles blow people up on the ground, in vehicles, etc. A Yemeni provincial Governor was blow up by drone driving to a meeting with Al-Qaeda types to try and reach an agreement with them- a meeting authorized by the U.S.-backed tyrant, Saleh. So if they're killing even government officials of allied regimes, you KNOW they make a lot of mistakes.

We already know how bad their vaunted "intel" can be. Since over two-thirds of the Gitmo prisoners were "mistakes" and have been released- remember Donald Rumsfeld called them "the worst of the worst"- you still stupidly believe what people in power tell you?- and the Pakis and Afghans sold hapless victims to the credulous Americans as "Al-Qaeda/Taliban terrorist" for the money, and such atrocities have occurred as the Afghan taxi driver hung from a cell wall in a U.S. dungeon in that country by a "contractor"- some "national security" sadist- who beat his legs to a pulp and left him hanging to die, as documented in the file "Taxi to the Dark Side" and elsewhere- I could go on, but since we know all this, why would you WANT the U.S. or ANY government to have the power of summary execution? Because sometimes they get it right and kill people YOU believe "deserve" to die? But you only believe it because of what you "know" from a mendacious propaganda system, aka "the media."

The progress of thousands of years of struggle to advance human rights is being ripped up. People are no longer entitled to a trial, no longer entitled to have an opportunity to contest evidence against them, in fact no evidence is needed to put them to death, or imprison them for life or however long is desired by their captors, as long as the label "terrorist" is affixed to them. Just as it was affixed to the Al-Jazeera cameraman imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for 6 years while the U.S. military pumped him for info about that hated organization and tried to force him to return to Al-J as a spy. (The U.S. has bombed Al-Jazeera 3 or 4 times, in Kabul and Baghdad, and killed their employees.)

A world where governments no longer feel the need to hide their dirty needs, where government murder is openly celebrated, is a much more dangerous world than the previous one, where governments had to go to the trouble of hiding their murder of their enemies, whether they "deserved" to die or not. No longer is hypocrisy the tribute that vice pays to virtue- although the U.S. still want to have it not both ways, but every which way. (Jay Carney again: bin Laden showed signs of resistance, whatever that means. Like some skinny old man who doesn't get exercised can't be cooled out with a gunbutt to the head or whatever by one of the dozens of supermen SEALs in his room!)

Just so stupid people don't misinterpret this- I don't like bin Laden. He was a vicious, murderous, fanatical, medieval nihilist. But there are people in the government who hate me too- and maybe you. If being hated is sufficient reason to be murdered without trial, an awful lot of people are in danger. So the "war on terror" not only has stripped us of our civil liberties and basic human rights, it has put us in grave danger, from the governments who claim to be protecting us. Because "your own" government has a lot more power over you than any bank of Muslim nuts thousands of miles away. And your chances of being killed by terrorists are a lot lot less than your chances of being killed in a motor vehicle accident. (That's like 40,000 people a year in the U.S., roughly.) Probably less than the chance of being killed in a hurricane or by lightning. Strip out the one anomalous year of 2001, and statistically the chances of a terrorist- the non-state kind- harming you are virtually zero.

The U.S. Government- not to mention other governments- has killed many millions of civilians over the years. Al-Qaeda's a bunch of punks next to them.